created 2025-03-05, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025situationist
Carried on thoughts from previous read of “The Society of the Spectacle.”
Spectacle - Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-drive phenomena; advertising, television, film and celebrity. The spectacle is capitalism’s instrument for pacifying and distracting the masses.
- the “derive”: (literally, to ‘derive’; “A trip with no destination, diverted arbitrarily en route.“) By taking random tour from unknown subway stations, the Situationists sought to inhabit geography in ways unimagined by their designers and planners. Another example of this sort of tactical subversion of original purposes: using public sites for graffiti art and propaganda.)
- the “detournment”: (literally ‘detouring’; we would say “repurposing” parts of the spectacle to expose its internal logic). Debord made films by splicing together: in both cases, what the Situationists do is a) acknowledge the enormous strategic superiority of the system, but b) then venture a tactical intervention (“on the ground of the other”). This way of responding to the idea of the totalizing power of the Spectacle can be followed through DeCerteau’s critique of Foucault, and the former’s development of what he calls “the practice of everyday life.”
- the art of the aphorism: If the preferred technique of the society of the spectacle is engulfment—total immersion of the spectator in a spectacle which is hurled at the eye and ear at a speed as fast as thought, cutting and morphing, at once absorptive and distracting, a tide of alluring candy for the eye and ear, and projected before us by a media apparatus others control—then, how does one slow down this media machine, and create the space for genuine critique? Debord’s answer in The Society of the Spectacle is the aphorism. Most probably indebted to Nietzsche, Debord’s aphorism offer short, abrupt, disconnected statements about the spectacle within advanced capitalism. Suggestive and difficult, they require a reader who is patient, active, and in dialogue with the text; harsh in tone and sweeping in their scope, each of these aphorisms seems designed to provoke and challenge the reader.